: For Students, Faculty, and Staff 
By Ellen Engseth
Curator, Immigration History Research Center Archives and Head, Migration and Social Services Collections
Each year, the Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA) provides Grant-in-Aid Awards to scholars to support visits to our collections for conducting research. Please join us in congratulating this year’s Grant-in-Aid Award winners at the Immigration History Research Center Archives!
Jessica Barbata Jackson is a Ph.D. candidate at University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) in the History Department. She specializes in U.S. immigration history, with a secondary focus on modern Italian history. She was recently awarded both the Humanities Division Dean’s Award at the UCSC Graduate Research Symposium and the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for the department. She holds a Master of Arts from UCSC. Her project, “’Ascribed Nationality’ & the Development of Italianita: Sicilian Civic Identity in Crisis in the Jim Crow Gulf South” considers racially-marked immigrants, and relates a comprehensive and specifically southern and transnational history of the Italian/Sicilian diaspora. She will investigate five areas in which they both reaffirmed and challenged the racially binary mandates of Jim Crow.
Tyler Miller is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research and teaching interests include African and Middle Eastern studies, American diplomatic history, labor history, migration studies, and colonialism/post-colonialism. He will be researching his project “Working Out Somalia: Transnational Migration, Labor, and Islam in the American Middle West, 1988-2012.” Using the Twin Cities as the de facto capital of Somali-American regional communities, he looks at secondary and return migrations from the lens of Somali labor history.
Stephen O’Donnell is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland). He received a Joint Masters in History from the University of Strathclyde and Central Michigan University in 2013. His research, “The Transatlantic Slovak National Movement, 1890-1920” assesses Slovak political nationalism, and investigates the role of trans-Atlantic links (such as remitted funds and news or political publications) as essential to understanding Slovak nationalism.
Patricia Rodda, a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of California (UC), Irvine, was recently a UC Human Rights Fellow, and received a Master of Arts in International Affairs from Marquette University. Her research interests include public law and international law regarding refugees, asylum, and LGBT individuals, as well as international intervention. Her funded project is “Determinants of asylum claim outcomes in cases filed in six states with common law traditions,” in which she examines factors determining asylum claim outcomes in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
Each awardee will be using the collections of the Immigration History Research Center Archives during their week of residency and each will host a Research-in-Progress talk, open to the public. Watch for further posts announcing those dates and times. With special thanks to our colleagues the Immigration History Research Center for their support!
About the IHRCA Grant-In-Aid Program
The Immigration History Research Center Archives offers Grant-in-Aid Awards program is open to scholars of all levels, including independent scholars, and supports a research visit of five days or more. Typically, awards are for $1,000, and four awards are given each year. The application is due June 1 of each year and the research visit is to occur within the next 13 months.
